


I guess I really didn’t realize (it’s so hard to breathe without you here)

by etoileyoongi



Category: Stray Kids (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Childhood Friends, And Then Enemies to Lovers, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, But in the end, Childhood Friends, Childhood Memories, Crying, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Friends to Enemies, It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Some Plot, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, only a little, they're cHiLdHoOd fwiends uwu, those two will always find their way back to each other, well not rlly enemies just minho being dumb :/, when i can think straight lol that’ll take a while
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:20:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26812798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/etoileyoongi/pseuds/etoileyoongi
Summary: Minho meets Jisung when he’s eight and Jisung is six and life is nothing but a big adventure, foreign soil waiting to be discovered by someone, by them. Hands and souls intertwined, ready to conquer the world. Together forever, like it's written in the stars.There are years of of melted ice cream and forgotten homework in the corner of a bedroom and after-school trips to the grocery store on their bikes. There is laughter and cheap fake tattoos and so much love and fondness.And then Jisung leaves and Minho gets cold and lonely and it’s as if it will never get better. After all, how could he possibly keep warm if his sun left.It takes 4 years and two broken hearts and more tears than a single person should shed in their life, but in the end, well, it’ll always be them.
Relationships: Han Jisung | Han/Lee Minho | Lee Know
Comments: 10
Kudos: 86





	I guess I really didn’t realize (it’s so hard to breathe without you here)

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this in an hour after a sudden splurge of inspiration last night lol what is grammar i don't know her.

Minho meets Jisung when he’s eight and Jisung is six and life is nothing but a big adventure, foreign soil waiting to be discovered by someone, by them. Hands and souls intertwined, ready to conquer the world. Together forever.

Han Jisung is small and has long black hair falling in front of his eyes, clipped back with a small butterfly hair clip, and a squirrel stuffy called Spear that the older takes a liking to immediately, almost bursting into tears the first time Jisung allows him to cuddle the small ball of fluff (maybe it had more to do with the fact that the little boy trusted him, but it wasn’t like that in the moment, wouldn’t dawn upon him for years after. Until- well, that’s for later). 

He has chubby cheeks and a scrawny body and snaggletooth that the neighbourhood kids tease him about until Minho steps in, telling them to get away, brow furrowed, face pulled as menacing as possible. He has sweaty hands that Minho always seems to be holding, dragging him along to the one swing they can fit on together, and a laugh that is bright and loud - too loud, some would say - roaring through the playground as they venture higher up into the sky, to the clouds and past them towards the sun.

Minho thinks Han Jisung shines just as brightly as the stars adorning the sky when he wakes up in the middle of the night, with his clear eyes and small pout and smile that stretches his lips wide. 

The year Minho is eight and Jisung is six is filled with playing in the sandbox and rolling around the grass and _their_ swing in the corner of the playground. Minho is never alone, leaving to return home with streaks of dirt on his clothes and scrapes on his knees and traces of a tiny, bubbly boy in every little nook of his whole being.

:

When Minho is nine and then ten and eleven and twelve, and Jisung grows up beside him, so does their friendship.

They still visit the playground, of course, sometimes, but that’s not all. They do other things now, picking flowers on their way to school to charm their teachers into letting them off early (because the time they’re at school is the time they can’t be together, and Minho without Jisung isn’t Minho, really) and dancing through the lanes towards the bakery to spend their pocket money on some sweets. Minho gets a cinnamon roll and Jisung a donut and they switch halfway through, because the younger boy gets overwhelmed easily by the _too_ sweet taste of the fried dough, and Minho can’t ever say no. The giggle and they pet cats on their way home, and then they wave goodbye, entering houses on the opposite sides of the street, knowing that one will end up eating over, anyways.

Those years are made out of melted ice cream and forgotten homework in the corner of a bedroom and after-school trips to the grocery store on their bikes. There is laughter and cheap fake tattoos and so much love and fondness and later, much much later when Minho would allow himself to look back with a gentleness that surprises even him, he’d think that maybe this is where he fell in love with Han Jisung. Or maybe he had always been.

:

Minho starts high school when he’s thirteen, just as his parents expect him to, and he watches as Jisung, eleven year old Jisung who is still as bright as the day they met, gets to go out to the mall and makes new friends and starts a new life, it seems like sometimes.

It’s not always like that, of course, and they are still the best of friends, but there’s something unfamiliar about it at times, something slightly unnerving.

Maybe it’s him, because he holes himself up in his room, only to come out with disheveled hair and dark bags underneath his eyes, but hey, he got a 100 on the test, so it’s all good. This is what he is supposed to do, he’s told, _you’re doing a good job, son, keep going_ . He’s not that eight year old boy in the park anymore, no matter how much he longs to that time.  
  


Jisung changes, just as he does. He starts painting his nails, bright colours and little glitters and sometimes even stickers expertly placed on them. He changes up his closet, introducing jeans and throwing out the shorts Minho loved so much, but it’s okay, because instead he hangs one of _his_ sweaters in there. He changes, not for the better or the worse, just different. 

Minho still loves him just as much, maybe even more now that their afternoons have to make place for studying sometimes, now that movie nights get more scarce. It’s more intense, maybe, and Minho realises that sometimes he misses his best friend and he hugs him tight the next time they see each other.

It’s a year of chipped blue nail polish and chat messages to the boy living just across the street and work piling up onto his narrow shoulders, and then into his small head. It’s falling asleep during his favorite movies, pulling Spear closer, feeling safe surrounded by his favorite people, safe enough to let go of his exhaustion.

:

When Minho is 14, Jisung leaves, two days before the surprise birthday party the elder had so carefully prepared for him, for his twelfth birthday. There would be balloons and cheesecake and some of the neighbourhood kids, and then it would just be them and cuddles and Spear, watching movies until the sun would rise again and then some. They never make it.

Because in the first week of September Jisung bursts into his room while Minho is doing the extracurricular exercises the teacher gave him - because his parents asked, because it’s good for him - and tells him they’re moving to wherever, whatever, and he looks.. almost excited? 

The house will have a swimming pool, Jisung tells him, and a trampoline, and he’ll have his own room and his dad said maybe they could even get a dog. Minho doesn’t hear any of it, because the city Jisung named is so, so far away, too far to bike to or take the bus and even too far to ask his mother to bring him, and doesn’t Jisung get it? This’ll be the end.

This is the end, he tells him. They won’t be friends anymore, they can’t be. No movie nights and no trips to the playground, and _is this really what Jisung wants, because he sure seems happy about it. Does he even care?_

He forces himself not to listen to Jisung’s replies, first confused, then indignant, then frantic. He walks the boy out, hand resting on his shoulder like a verdict - though gentle, because it’s Jisung, and he’s Minho, and that’s how they are - and closes the door, his eyes, his heart. Screams.

He watches as the Han’s pile up all their stuff into a moving truck and plant a ‘for sale’ sign in their front yard, and then a ‘sold’ one a few days later and, oh god, he thinks, they are really doing it. They are really leaving me. Jisung is really leaving me.

And then they all step into the car one morning and bid their house goodbye with loud voices full of mirth and Jisung looks up at his window, sadly smiling and waving even though he can’t see Minho in the familiar darkness of his room, and it feels so final.

And then they’re gone and Minho _doesn’t know what to do._

The year is filled with afternoons of swimming and trips to the bookstore next to the park followed by long nights of math equations and korean poems until his head thumps (but it’s worth it, because he still gets to see his friend), before it’s filled with deflated balloons that seem to taunt him and a loneliness he never thought he’d experience and the absence of a smaller frame beside him on the couch.

:

And then Minho is fifteen and Jisung’s thirteenth birthday passes by and he is reminded just how much he misses his friend.

He had been able to forget, sometimes, for a while, that there was supposed to be another boy next to him and another voice singing along with him and another hand caressing his trembling one. Instead, he drowns himself in his work, let’s it happen, writes down answer after answer about writers he’d never enjoy and integrals and everything else, _everything_. 

And then it’s September and Jisung is thirteen now, he realises, and in a moment of weakness he grabs the house phone and dials Jisung’s number, the one he knows by heart from long nights of sitting at their windows, telling each other and the moon stories. 

And he doesn’t expect Jisung to pick up, because why would he, maybe this isn’t even the right number anymore, maybe Jisung forgot the number Minho is calling from.

But then there’s a click and a soft voice saying hello into the horn and _Jisung_ floods all of his senses, overwhelmingly so.

But there’s noise in the background, a lot of it, and it hits Minho that Jisung’s life hadn’t stood still just because his did, just because he cruelly wanted it to. Jisung has a new life now, and new friends and a pool and maybe even the labrador he’d always wanted. He can’t just barge into his life anymore and expect him to be okay anymore, can’t ruin it for him.

So he hangs up the phone, sliding down the wall, arms around his knees and he cries cries _cries_. He’s alone.

And then he picks himself back up and goes back to his desk, doesn’t get a wink of sleep that night, gets a 100 on the test the next morning. His parents tell him they’re proud and he wants to tell them he’s numb but he doesn’t.

That year’s a hard one, the hardest one yet, only a foretaste of what might be coming. There’s the rustling of test papers and red markers and a whispered happy birthday to the moon on the 13th of September. Not much more, really. Just a blur.

:

One night, during the year Minho is sixteen and Jisung is fourteen and has left for two years, it just gets too much and he can’t sit at his desk anymore, numbers blurring together and little drops of long since given-up hope threatening to fall. 

He climbs out of his window and runs through the dark, cold night, right into the first bar he sees. It’s muffy in there, light warm, creating a golden halo around the room, and interior a dark brown, somehow familiar like his grandparents’ couch. It’s not that crowded, regulars occupying the counter and music playing softly in the background and-

And there is a boy in the middle of it all.

The guy is small, but with a presence that fills the room. Blond hair and dimples and Minho just can’t tear away his gaze. Their eyes meet, but he still refuses to look away, because it feels like, for the first time in forever, someone is truly looking at him, sees him as he is. And it’s dumb, he thinks, as the other approaches him, but for once he allows himself to set his rationality aside.

The guy’s name is Chan and he’s from the big city Minho visits twice a year, with his mom, to go to the dentist and that one time to buy the brand shoes they couldn’t find in their little town and he _really_ needed. He’s just as brilliant as Minho expected, and they hit it off in a way that is almost scary, in a way, unnatural if anything. They talk and talk and he just can’t seem to stop, words spilling out of his mouth about anything and everything. Nothing of any importance, but Chan seems to look through it, somehow, through the walls he had built around him so long ago and straight at the damaged, scared, lonely boy he really is.

He leaves that night with a note with a scribbled address on it and the promise of a friend and the feeling that someone is truly _trying_.

It’s lonely that year. Lonely and empty besides the little silver lining Chan brought into his life, filled with all-nighters and headaches and no time to be himself. It’s suffocating, and the more he keeps going, the more he loses himself.

:

When Minho is 17 (and Jisung is 15, not that he cares, because he shouldn’t, and he doesn’t, not anymore) he decides that this is not what he wants and that he refuses to fit into the box his parents have oh-so carefully crafted for him and that he _just can’t do this any longer._

There are a lot of tears and screaming and when he looks back on it later, he thinks that maybe this is when a little part of perfect, smart Lee Minho died, making place for unnerved Lee Know, strong and cold and as beautiful as a rock in the middle of the waves, standing up proudly. After a while the words that just keep coming, streaming down upon him like a waterfall of disappointment and regret and _how could you do this what happened to our son what is wrong with you_ , become just syllables without a meaning, empty, spoken in vain and nescience.

One night it gets too much, too loud, wrapping too tight around his throat and his heart, trying to force out the little aspirations and dreams he has left inside his being. He jumps up from the table in the middle of yet another lecture his father, his conceiver, is giving him in the hopes of talking some sense into his rebellious teenage mind, and he rushes around like a whirlwind, soul telling him to just _go_ before he can’t anymore, leaving to the sobs of his mother inside the living room and his fathers disappointed stare.

He takes the night train to the city, roaming around aimlessly through large lanes and dark alleys before he finds an address inside his pocket, long forgotten, but not really, the only person that seemed to have cared.

He turns up in front of Chan’s apartment at three in the morning, and is pulled in immediately, set down at the kitchen table with a blanket around his shoulders and a hot mug of tea steaming in front of him and a boy with a sweet smile and freckles at the other side. He’s quiet and then he talks and then there’s silence again, two boys looking at him with something in between sadness and pity in their eyes, a cozy living room with a soft couch and a cat behind them.

(He hopes he gets to stay, gets to call something home again).

(He does. They take him in. He cries until he can’t anymore and they hold him and pull him close and it feels _so good_ , _so liberating_ ).

The year is filled with papers full of formulas torn to shreds, tears streaming down his face, and eyes across the kitchen table refusing to meet him and being truly alone, and then it’s filled with long nights of emptying his heart and his soul and strangers that slowly fight their way into his life, there to stay, and a genuine smile, the first one in years, somewhere in the middle of september.

:

And then Minho is eighteen and he works in a bookstore, and in a coffee shop too, sometimes, and sixteen year old Jisung walks right back into his life, reminding him of everything he’s lost, or maybe of everything he gets to have again, a second chance.

It’s not with a bang either, it just happens, suddenly, perfectly, as he slides next to him into the booth Minho is sitting at, watching Chan and one of his friends perform on the stage of a stuffy bar, like the one Minho met him at all those years ago (only two really, but you know, a lot happened). He comes there often, though he doesn’t really talk to the people Chan introduces to him, because life’s been hard and he’s been cold and things like that don’t just disappear. So he just smiles at them softly, listens to the conversations around him. They seem to get it, anyway. It’s nice.

But one night, a small, lithe body comes to sit down next to him, and wow, he really can’t do this on his own, he thinks as he looks up, right into eyes that still shine as bright as their first day on the playground and a smile as wide as was carved into his memory. 

(But maybe, just maybe, he doesn’t have to).

The year is filled with the smell of old books and roasted coffee beans and walking home alone late at night, and he’s content, thinks this is as good as it’ll get.

And then the sun comes back into his life like a whirlwind and it gets filled with waiting for him in front of the school and trips to the aquarium and long nights in and _a lot_ of talking and explaining and getting to know each other again. And then, a tentative kiss pressed to his lips on his birthday. 

Lee Minho is eighteen and Han Jisung is sixteen and this is how it’ll be forever.

**Author's Note:**

> I tried a new writing style, so please leave a comment with your thoughts! <3


End file.
